Spring-cleaning time in the EU institutions

Gareth Harding assesses the growing pressure for sweeping change in all three of the Union’s main bodies

IT MAY have almost as much to do with the arrival of spring as the exit of the entire European Commission, but there has been a lot of talk about roots and branches recently.

Following the publication of the wise people’s report into fraud, nepotism and mismanagement in the institution last week, the Commission’s Vice-President Sir Leon Brittan said the EU now had an “historic opportunity to carry out the kind of radical root and branch reform that will ensure the Commission in the new millennium is more efficient, more transparent and more accountable”.

UK Premier Tony Blair used the same phrase when presenting his plans for a shake-up of the EU’s executive arm to the British parliament, and it was uttered by all the European Parliament’s political groups, numerous heads of state and a fair few Acting Commissioners during the course of the week.

Politicians are never slow to jump on the bandwagon of change when it starts rolling. But whilst all concur on the need for far-reaching reform of the Union’s beleaguered bureaucracy, there seems to be little agreement as to what this exactly means.

French President Jacques Chirac said the “unprecedented crisis” facing the EU was a chance to create a stronger executive body. However, many other governments view the current confusion as an opportunity to claw back some of the powers transferred to Brussels over the past decade.

Sweden, meanwhile, is using the report’s findings to push for greater openness in the Union’s institutions. In an interview with European Voice this week, Swedish Foreign Minister Anna Lindh said Council of Ministers’ meetings must be opened to the public and, as a general rule, all documents should be made freely available.

“If the EU is more open and transparent, you will not have the same risk of corruption and misuse of resources,” she added.

But despite strong support from the UK, Denmark and Finland, Sweden’s demand for greater openness is likely to fall on deaf ears in France and most Mediterranean countries.

Much of the rhetoric about reform being spouted by EU leaders has been more aimed at echoing popular sentiments than offering constructive advice.

Typical of this were Blair’s comments about choosing the future Commission boss. “We cannot have the next president decided in the same way as the last,” he said after the Commission’s mass resignation. “The top jobs should go to the top people. Merit and merit alone should decide.”

In reality, few doubt that the choice of Romano Prodi to head the Commission had as much to do with the fact that the former Italian premier is a left-winger from a southern European country as with the fact that he has good leadership qualities. It is also a sure bet that when Europe’s other top jobs are doled out this year, all EU leaders will be queuing up for their country’s share of the posts.

One change almost certain to result from the Commission’s collapse is an amendment to the EU treaty to allow the Parliament to sack individual Commissioners. At present, MEPs only have the power to throw out the entire team, but the behaviour of Acting Education Commissioner Edith Cresson has strengthened the case for allowing them to ‘cherry-pick’.

Earlier this month, Europe’s Socialist leaders – who are in power in 13 of the EU’s 15 member states – called for the Parliament to be given this right. This demand was reiterated by MEPs in a resolution adopted this week.

Lindh insists that it is “very important not to think that the Commission’s problems can be solved by changing the Commissioners”, adding: “It is also vital to change the way the EU’s administration works.”

A raft of measures to achieve this goal was unveiled by UK Foreign Minister Robin Cook this week. In a paper likely to gain the support of most member states, Cook calls for a far-reaching reform of the Commission’s management structure.

He suggests, among other things, that the institution should undertake a wide-ranging external audit to improve the way it handles EU money, Commission directors-general should be made accountable to the Parliament, and the institution’s generous system of pay and perks should be overhauled.

Many of the reforms mooted by member states are already in the pipeline, prompting Acting Home Affairs Commissioner Anita Gradin to remark that “it is a bit ironic that we were the first Commission to clean things up and now we will be the first one to go”.

Since the Parliament first threatened to sack the Commission in January, Acting President Jacques Santer has indeed been busy shaking up the institution. Codes of conduct for Commissioners and their staff have been unveiled, and further changes to the antiquated staffing structures are promised later in the year.

Speaking to MEPs earlier this week, Santer said it was essential to ensure that the Commission’s current crisis was “transformed into a catalyst for deep and lasting reform of the European institutions”.

Unfortunately for Santer, having let the genie of reform out of the bottle, he was unable to put it back in – and, like ex-Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev before him, he was eventually swept up in a tidal wave of change of his own making. As Santer himself acknowledged this week: “Perhaps it is an inevitable fact of history that crises often strike not when things get worse but when they start getting better.”

The Parliament’s 214-strong Socialist Group has already warned that it expects a commitment to “dramatic and radical change” from nominees to replace the present team.”This resignation is not the end of the story but the beginning,” said Socialist leader Pauline Green.

A second experts’ report looking at management culture in the Commission is due to be published in the autumn and the Parliament is likely to press for further changes when it holds ‘auditions’ for nominated Commissioners.

The spotlight is also likely to fall on reform of the EU’s other institutions as the year progresses.

Last week’s report criticised Union governments for failing to carry out their role as the EU’s other budgetary arm and MEPs have attacked the Council of Ministers for signing off the EU’s much-criticised accounts for 1996 and 1997 without so much as a murmur.

Attention is also likely to focus on some of the Parliament’s more dubious practices. MEPs have been widely criticised in the past for lining their pockets with generous travel expenses, wasting money shuttling between offices in Brussels and Strasbourg, and allowing the president’s staff to parachute into top jobs in the institution.

EU governments are currently poring over a new statute which should go some way to cleaning up the Parliament’s act. But until then, as Liberal Group leader Pat Cox said this week, MEPs remain “vulnerable” to allegations of graft and should not “demand of other institutions what we will not demand of ourselves”.